By Chris Kirkham, Judith Langowski and Peter Henderson
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Seven years before wildfires tore through opposite ends of the Los Angeles area, the Tubbs Fire in Northern California’s Sonoma County jumped a six-lane freeway and decimated Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park subdivision, a suburban enclave similar to Pacific Palisades and Altadena.
The fire destroyed about 5,000 homes in Santa Rosa and the surrounding area in October 2017, with about 1,500 of those in Coffey Park, making it California’s costliest wildfire disaster at the time. Within three years, 80% of Coffey Park’s destroyed homes were fully rebuilt and occupied, according to local officials.
The journey was long, uncertain and filled with detours, according to interviews with Coffey Park residents who rebuilt and local government officials. Debris removal was a lengthy, cumbersome process; there was contractor fraud, leading to criminal convictions; the minutiae of government approvals at every step caused frustration.
But the experiences of those who rebuilt in Coffey Park and Santa Rosa also showed the power of collective action by residents, and local government success streamlining construction, which offer a template for the Los Angeles-area communities of Pacific Palisades and Altadena, where more than 16,000 homes and other structures were destroyed by this month’s fires that also killed 28 people.
“Band together and have a group that you go through it with,” said Jeff Okrepkie, who started a nonprofit rebuilding group for Coffey Park, finished his rebuild in early 2020 and later became a Santa Rosa city council member. “It’s always easier to get your questions answered when you’re asking for 100 people, or 500 people.”
‘NOT MUCH YOU CAN DO’
David Kovalevski wants to rebuild his century-old Altadena craftsman house that burned in the Eaton Fire northeast of Los Angeles, but the task looks daunting. “When can we even start?” he said. “It looks like a war zone.”
He is trying to understand what insurance will pay, and how that will compare to new, higher prices as thousands of homeowners in his area try to rebuild at the same time. “How will they even manage in a reasonable timeframe to rebuild so many houses at the same time?”
Damian Clopton had many of the same questions in the weeks after he fled his burning Coffey Park home in October 2017 with his wife, Ashley Osbun, four cats and a laptop.
He remembered the “shell shock,” waking up each morning in an unfamiliar house, only to realize a few seconds later his predicament. “Everything just sucks in the beginning,” Clopton said. “You really want to move on and there’s not much you can do.”
That was because, like in Pacific Palisades and Altadena, residents were largely kept out as emergency crews sent cadaver dogs to search for missing people and Hazmat crews removed toxic waste.
Then came debris removal, which started about a month after the fire and took two-and-a-half months to complete. In Sonoma County in 2017, residents could choose a FEMA-contracted debris removal program or hire a private contractor, which was more expensive and required certifications for disposing of hazardous material.
“People think they’re just going to be able to get a dump truck and a backhoe, build their house and move on,” said Steve Rahmn, a Coffey Park resident who completed his rebuild in 2020. “Government’s got its due process.”
The Santa Rosa FEMA program offered the easiest path but suffered from bureaucratic bungles, such as FEMA’s policy of paying contractors based on the weight of debris they carried off site. Crews eager for maximum weight left sunken lots, and the state ultimately had to create a new program to replace homeowners’ missing dirt.
California Governor Gavin Newsom’s Office of Emergency Services this month announced similar debris removal options for private properties in the wake of the Palisades and Eaton fires.
First, Environmental Protection Agency crews must remove hazardous waste, including electric-vehicle batteries, which began earlier this month. Los Angeles County Public Works Director Mark Pestrella has said debris removal could take six months to a year.
U.S. Congressman Mike Thompson, whose district includes Santa Rosa, said he has developed what he calls a “disaster booklet” to impart lessons to representatives from areas affected by wildfires. “There’s no need to reinvent the wheel,” he said, citing pre-approval of building plans as a model for faster reconstruction.
After crews finished debris removal in Santa Rosa, the neighborhood was a blank canvas, meaning residents had to get property lines surveyed again. Potentially every homeowner had to hire a surveyor in order to start drawing up plans for new homes.
That’s where the collective action began. Though scattered around the area and the country, residents kept in touch on social media, social meetings like “Wine Wednesdays” and an area newsletter. Many started meeting in the first few weeks at a local junior college and a performing arts center, said Okrepkie, and the numbers built as the weeks went by.
City planning officials attended the meetings and started making policies directly resulting from those discussions, said Gabe Osburn, Santa Rosa’s director of planning and economic development.
After hearing surveying concerns, city officials helped connect residents with local surveyors to speed up the process, Osburn said.
Discussions from those meetings also led to the city creating a “resilient” zone for fire-damaged areas, with reduced planning and design requirements.
“Anything that would be an impediment from a time standpoint, or a cost standpoint, we analyzed,” Osburn said.
In the wake of the Los Angeles-area fires, Newsom suspended certain state environmental reviews in the fire-affected areas, and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass signed an order creating a new permitting center to be staffed seven days a week in the fire-affected areas.
In Santa Rosa, local builders also sped up the recovery process by drawing up a handful of home designs that were pre-approved by local officials. This allowed many residents to choose from a menu of options and quickly build a house.
Some homeowners, like Carol McHale, were not so lucky. She and her partner lost more than $100,000 of their personal savings after a builder asked for money upfront but never completed their rebuild. He was among several contractors who were convicted of fraud in the years after the fire.
McHale started over with another contractor, having to revisit every excruciating decision: Vinyl or hardwood floors, quartz or granite for kitchen counters, what paint color inside?
“We were making $10,000 decisions every day,” McHale said. “Even years later, it makes my stomach hurt.” But out of that painful experience, she also found hope: She and her partner, Erin Murphy, re-committed to their relationship, and will soon celebrate their 25th anniversary.
“People say ‘I don’t know how you did it,'” she said. “You do one day; you do the next one.”
‘I CAN CONTROL THIS’
The rebuilding process was often an emotional roller coaster, residents said.
Clopton chose to be his own general contractor, making substantial changes to the original design. He still hasn’t fully finished.
“Yes, they’ve gone out of their way to get rid of regulations, at the same time that they pile on other regulations,” he said. “This is a slog.”
Okrepkie said that after debris removal was complete, heavy rains in early 2018 delayed all construction, just as he was hoping to break ground. Work progressed, though, and by late 2019 the drywall was complete on his new home.
“All of a sudden you’re like, ‘This is the exact dimension of the living room I’m going to watch the Super Bowl in,” he recalled. “You see all the bedrooms upstairs and you say ‘I wonder which one my son is going to want?'”
For him, there was a satisfaction that came with rebuilding in the wake of a fire, a sense that he once again had control.
“I couldn’t control losing my house, or moving away, but I can control this,” he said. “I can control what my countertops look like. I think there’s a healthy aspect to that.”
(Reporting by Chris Kirkham, Judith Langowski and Peter Henderson; Editing by Sandra Maler)
